


Nomenclature

by orphan_account



Series: Fullmetal Fortnight 2014 [6]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: F/M, Gen, Trans Male Character, Transphobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-11
Updated: 2014-03-11
Packaged: 2018-01-15 08:29:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1298248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The name on the birth certificate read <em>Alanna van Hohenheim</em> but by the time of his seventh year he called himself Alphonse. Alphonse—and Edward—<em>Elric</em>, Ed wrote in block letters in the front cover of the alchemy book, picked up from one of the travelling book peddlers that still came by looking for a man with golden hair and thick spectacles. Al squinted. “But—”</p><p>“He left,” Ed snapped curtly, but behind the flat anger looped a thin coil of pain. “He’s not our real dad, Al, and he’s never, <em>ever</em> going to be.” Ed hovered over the final stroke of the pen, the <em>c</em>, before he dotted the name with a finality that ground Al down to the bone, even though he corrected himself that such an increase in gravity would require a massive amount of energy. But science—at least, no science of which Al <em>or</em> his older brother had heard—had never quite been able to predict human emotion. “It’s okay. You’ve got Mom and you’ve got me. We’re the Elric family and we’re gonna stick together no matter what.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nomenclature

**Author's Note:**

> Written for FMA Week 2014. Prompt 3-A: "Traditions". Written for the prompt: "oH MY GOD I READ YOUR TRANS LAN FAN FIC AND LIKE COULD I REQUEST FTM AL PLEASE i'll spontaneously combust". Queer headcanons are my speciality, come on, come all.
> 
> Ronshito is the in-universe equivalent of Japan, since Izumi is a Japanese name, not a Chinese one.
> 
> Rosé Thomas's deceased lover is referred to with gender neutral pronouns in the original manga, no matter the fact that most translations made some heteronormative assumptions, so I prompted that.
> 
> I know far less about FTM than I do about MTF, but I did a heck-ton of research on dysphoria and I asked one of my FTM friends about it as well. Still, if I made any errors, as always, please feel free to call me out. I'll correct them if at all possible.
> 
> Trigger warnings for some transphobia, dysphoria, and internalised transphobia.
> 
> If I made any continuity errors, forgive me. I had the manga open the entire time but honestly it was late and I probably did not fact-check.
> 
> Unedited/unbeta'd/etc. Enjoy and thank you for reading.

The name on the birth certificate read _Alanna van Hohenheim_ but by the time of his seventh year he called himself Alphonse. Alphonse—and Edward— _Elric_ , Ed wrote in block letters in the front cover of the alchemy book, picked up from one of the travelling book peddlers that still came by looking for a man with golden hair and thick spectacles. Al squinted. “But—”

“He left,” Ed snapped curtly, but behind the flat anger looped a thin coil of pain. “He’s not our real dad, Al, and he’s never, _ever_ going to be.” Ed hovered over the final stroke of the pen, the _c_ , before he dotted the name with a finality that ground Al down to the bone, even though he corrected himself that such an increase in gravity would require a massive amount of energy. But science—at least, no science of which Al _or_ his older brother had heard—had never quite been able to predict human emotion. “It’s okay. You’ve got Mom and you’ve got me. We’re the Elric family and we’re gonna stick together no matter what.”

Al folded himself into Ed’s embrace, warm and secure and safe despite his brother’s trembling arms. “Yes, Brother,” he whispered, his voice trailing off. Then he nodded, if to himself. “. . . we’re the Elric brothers. And Mom.”

“Damn _right_ we’re the Elric brothers,” Ed growled, fierce and protective and magnificent, “and hell, if anyone says otherwise, they’d better be ready to _go_.”

“Brother!”

He glanced away, chewing his lower lip. “Don’t tell Mom I said that. The _H_ -word.”

Al flicked his nose. “Don’t worry, Brother; your secret’s safe with me.”

 

After their mother fell ill, Winry’s grandmother opened her doors to a world of noisy machinery and barking dogs. Years later Al would come to understand that Granny had waged war on the silence that trailed behind absence. Winry’s parents worked in Ishval behind a border of which the children understood little, except that letters and parcels died at the gorge.

Still later Al would come to understand how much his mother had strived to fight the same silence. When his father left, he carried sound in his briefcase; when Winry’s parents left, they carried something different, something that Al would not be capable of naming for most of his life.

Because his father would not return. But her parents were supposed to, and didn’t.

A handful of weeks before she slipped into a deep slumber and then into a deeper death, his mother called Granny to her bedside. “Please treat Al well. When he’s old enough, show him how to change the name on his certificate. I don’t want to cause a stir before he’s sure.”

“I’ve raised more kids in my life than I could shake a stick at, and you think I can’t handle one more dumb little boy?” Granny chuckled, as Winry later informed the brothers huddled under her blanket. “Now, rest up, dear. Your boys’ll need you yet.”

They _did_. But the truth had a curious way of transforming the widest eyes of idealism to slitted shadows of grief.

He wore a suit to the funeral. It rained, like the skies wept for her passing, or maybe some deity in which he did not believe. But he held Ed’s hand and Winry’s as he seeked solace under Granny’s umbrella, wishing for all of the world that he could never feel the rain or the pain again.

 

Granny raised him and his brother with patience concealed behind lists of chores and love hidden beneath spanks on the rear. He drank milk endlessly, willing his body to grow sufficiently strong and mind to follow until he could see his mother’s warm smile again, while Ed shunned the bottles and instead ran about working odd jobs for the Resembool folk to afford chalk and paper and alchemy texts. Under the pallor light of the yellow lamp, the brothers scrutinised the Rockbells’ tomes on anatomy. At least those, each thicker than their forearms combined, counted as staples for any automail engineer.

Several months into their study, Ed and Al made a discovery of sorts. Or rather, Al did: Ed had fallen asleep with his face buried in the open crevice of the book; Granny constantly warned him he’d need glasses one day.

A different book— _The Human Body: Our Home, with Detailed Illustration and the Most Recent Practical & Alchemical Medicines, Twelfth Edition_ by Mira Guinevere Armstrong—had captured Al’s attention. Surreptitiously covering the lamp each time he heard footsteps, lest Granny interrupt on the basis of the clock having rung two in the morning, he flipped the pages one by one and scrawled down notes about the reconstruction of specific organs in the second spiral notebook of the five neatly stacked on a corner of the table.

He paused at the chapter labelled _Reproductive Anatomy_. Not at the heading, but at the first diagram on the page. Two diagrams. One labelled _MALE_ , the other _FEMALE_. But something looked wrong. A misprint, perhaps. Yet a small arrow pointed to each organ, delineating the aspect _of_ each organ, with tiny serif lettering that marked the nomenclature in Amestrisian above the line and in Xerxian beneath.

Hesitantly he brushed his hand over his lower abdomen. On his belly he sensed the nervous pulse of his heartbeat in his fingertips. Fixing his gaze on the diagram, he slid his palm downwards. “You’re an alchemist,” he told himself firmly. “It’s a matter of science.”

Of course he knew the answer, but the experiment—conducted with the control not a faint acknowledgement at the back of his head but staring him in the face—confirmed his suspicions. He woke his brother up and begged him to drop his trousers. Ed wiped his eyes blearily. “What the hell’s wr—oh. Shit.”

On tiptoes silenced by thick socks they crept to the bathroom. Face red, Ed acquiesced to his brother’s request; said brother perched on the edge of the toilet with his thighs locked together.

“It’ll be fine,” said Ed, ruffling Al’s hair. “We’re alchemists. If we can bring Mom back, we can do _anything_. We’ll figure it out.”

Al dipped his head. “Soon, right?”

“Move over.” He scooted; Ed settled his weight, hips and shoulders together. “I guess we’ve spent too long pissin’ around in Resembool.”

“We could find a teacher.” Ed raised his eyebrows, apparently offended by the suggestion; Al rolled his eyes. “Come on, Brother! We’ve done a lot, and we could do it on our own. But it’ll be faster if we have a teacher, right?”

“Yeah. And the faster we get Mom back, the faster things can go back to how they used to be.” Folding his arms over his chest, Ed nodded. “We’re gonna find ourselves a teacher. And _then_ we’re gonna kick butt. ‘Cause we’re the Elric brothers and that’s what we do.”

Al hugged his knees. “Thanks, Brother. You always make me feel better.”

“Dumbass. That’s _my_ line.”

 

On the day before they were set to leave to find a mentor, Al and Ed fought over who would marry Winry one last time; Al stood over him by half a centimetre and Ed yelled about being the older brother and how _dare_ Al usurp his place. Winry smacked him over the head with her wrench before inviting Al for tea.

 

On the island Al and Ed taught themselves to eat ants, to chew grass, to slay wild rabbits and fish for survival, and for one glorious month Al could sit around shirtless without his brother glaring at the crowd as if daring anyone to so much as _breathe a word_.

The sun sank into his skin and turned all of him gold as his hair and his eyes. “Like the tales of the Golden Sage of the West,” he announced as he polished off a caught magpie. “He—or she, I guess—practically _made_ alchemy. Maybe we’re destined to do the same, huh?” His face brightened. “Turn equivalent exchange on its ear and all?”

Ed snorted. “That’s bullcrap.”

“ _You’re_ bullcrap.”

“ _You’re_ a stupid little brother who believes in stupid fairytales for stupid little kids.” He pushed Al off of the upturned log; Al scrambled to his feet to tackle Ed even harder until they were both rolling around wrestling in the dirt. “The great Edward Elric deserves a better little brother. I’m gonna sell you to the rabbit shop and buy a rabbit instead.”

Al stuck his tongue out as he kneed his brother in the side. “Stop quoting kids’ radio shows, Brother.”

“What? I _am_ a kid.” Ed responded with an uppercut that narrowly missed Al by maybe a centimetre or two.

“So you’re admitting it?”

As though going over his words in his head, Ed narrowed his eyes; widening them again suddenly he yelped. “That’s not what I—”

Al jabbed him in the chest, sending him stumbling backwards. “Doesn’t mean that’s not what you said. Lots of people don’t mean what they say.”

His brother caught his wrist and pulled himself up until they stood eye to eye. Two identical grins, dusty and determined at once. “But I’m an Elric, and _Elrics_ mean what they goddamn say, Al. You should know. C’mon, don’t you trust me?”

“Yeah.” Al’s grin widened. “And I trust _me_ , too.”

 

Sensei knew. Of course Izumi Curtis, the greatest alchemist that the Elric brothers would ever meet, knew. Al never quite managed to decipher when Sensei had _figured it out_ , although there was nothing _to_ figure out, really. Ed grumbled about it for days afterwards: As usual his older brother had taken the horrors of the world upon his shoulders.

One day the weight would crack over his bent shoulders and gravity would plunge down his pillars of salt and pillars of sand. He called himself Icarus but Al knew him as Atlas; on that day, when Ed needed his brother to care, Al would shift the weight to his bones and lift it above his quivering soul for as long as Ed needed him.

Under Sensei’s tutelage the brothers tore into the laws of alchemy. The world spun under their fingers in shimmers of ice-blue lightning. The universe was theirs to control, and the city of Dublith rang out with sights and smells of which the brothers had never heard but in stories and books and the occasional radio show, crackling with static, that blared out from East City. Automobiles belching exhaust; vendors selling foods that burned the tongue or cooled the throat; Cretan women with spindly cigarettes between their fingers and Xingese men with boiled goose eggs in their palms, Drachman men with half-empty liquor bottles against their feet and Ronshitese women with butchershops under their iron fists.

Whenever Ed and Al hit town, sometimes by themselves—whenever they could sneak off from Sensei’s lessons—and sometimes with Sensei or with her husband, the townsfolk would wave at the brothers, ruffle their hair, compliment Sensei on the two young boys she raised. Sensei would sneer proudly and clap the brothers’ backs, but on occasion Al caught her frowning, perhaps to herself, afterwards.

He thought nothing of it.

The first time Sensei discovered them running off to town—her husband, in fact, with a basket of eggs over one shoulder and a freshly killed boar over the other—she said nothing but released them from lessons for the remainder of the evening. They waited in their rooms with heaviness in their stomachs and their chins cupped in their palms. When she stomped up the staircase the brothers ripped through their drawers in search of boxers and shorts and trousers to pull over their rear ends to protect themselves from the inevitable spanking.

By the time she opened the door, the brothers cowered in bed, poofy behinds raised in the air. She barked out laughter. “I’m done with lessons. That crap doesn’t work and I don’t need to hold your hands anyway. You’ll come up when you feel like studying alchemy. Otherwise you can bum around all day if that’s what you’re into as long as you keep working to pay rent.” With that she turned, left, shut the door.

Left to their own devices of studying, the brothers spent a week and a half doing nothing, enjoying the vacation. Then their mother’s birthday came and past. The morning thereafter Sensei found two bundles of gold in her bed waving alchemy texts in her face. Ed: chemistry. Al: biology, medicine, anatomy. Together they would create humanity, Ed from the quintessential building blocks of the body, Al from the interconnections between life.

Like a scientific name. _Homo sapiens_ , two words that alone meant little, two parts united to the whole. Nomenclature made significant by arranging and union.

They redoubled their training efforts. She embraced their dedication; they embraced her knowledge. And all that came with it.

 

Once, while helping her pack meat orders, Al called her _Mom_. On accident. She said nothing, and he said nothing, carrying on the conversation as if nothing had occurred.

 _Something_ had, something Al couldn’t explain or name.

Sensei spent the evening mumbling to herself. Curled up on the couch with her hand on her stomach and her nose in a book about good parenting.

 

The night prior to his birthday, Al was perusing through books on anatomy and its relations to alchemy while footsteps banged outside. Lifting his chin, he caught the first wisps of anger: Al listened to the argument from the closet under the stairs where the floor smelled of meat and sacks of salts crammed against the walls. Ed screaming at her in a tight sort of voice that revealed his attempt to cloak the fight in silence, Sensei yelling at him for yelling at _her_. “It’s unhealthy,” she hissed, equally incapable of quieting her anger, and Al shrank against the doorframe, nails digging into the wood as his frame curled inwards like she’d just struck a blow to her chest. “You don’t have to pretend that she’s a boy for the world to take her seriously. There are even female State Alchemists, curse that programme and everything it stands for.”

“Ever since Mom died—”

“And she doesn’t have to be a _boy_ to take charge of a house, Edward. I thought you were smarter than that.”

“ _Sensei_ —”

She sighed. “What?”

“ _He_ —” Ed stomped his foot. “—is a _boy_. He’s always been. It’s not his fault that he doesn’t have a—a—uh—” He sputtered and Al could picture the blush. “—uh, you know, _boy parts_.”

“He . . . _oh_. Oh.” A pause and a sound of shuffling. The electricity of alchemy ran through the floorboards, jittering up into his limbs, and he heard Ed’s gasp of wonder. “There. Is that any better?”

Ed clapped his hands together once, twice, thrice. “I really wanna learn how to transmute without an array, Sensei. Al’s gonna be so happy.”

Sensei laughed. “She’ll probably be happier if I get her something more exciting. Hm. Though I _did_ already have those books on chemistry and medicine.” She _hrm_ ed. “Huh. I never stopped to wonder why he was so interested in biology.”

“W-what?”

“Nothing. Never mind.”

When Al unwrapped the trio of books and the white sweatshirt, he could feel the transmuted marks on the fabric’s length. He struggled it on. Warm and heavy and safe, akin to one of his brother’s hugs. The books surprised him. Two were thick. _Introduction to Advanced Physiology, Updated & Revised to Reflect New Findings, Translated from the Aerugish_ and _Miseries and Maladies, a Compendium_. The sorts of books that would have filled the Rockbells’ shelves, or perhaps his father’s, if his father studied medicine. Simple enough. But the _third_ startled him: a slim green volume marked with a fig leaf. _Gender and Equilibrium: A New Take on Gender Theory and Biology_ , by Hideyoshi Le Châtelier.

“What’s the . . . what this last one?” he said, fishing for a smile.

“I read it last night,” Sensei answered. “It’s rather quick, but very informative, and all of the alchemy references there—as far as I know—are true. I have a feeling you might enjoy it.”

Al devoured the volume in all of an hour. Ed borrowed it thereafter while Al lay on his back in the sea of blankets and pillows, observing the patterns of sunbeams dancing over the ceiling.

The book. The _book_. The author, who had lived several decades before him, had been born a woman. Had been _told_ , as a child, that he were a woman. Had known himself to be a man and had waited in the chrysalis until the world could allow him the chance to emerge in his full glory. Had left his mark in a book

Al wasn’t the only one. He wasn’t special, wasn’t some sort of magical changeling, wasn’t some kind of unique freak. He had a people. A history. A tradition.

A road to walk down on.

 _Trans_ , the book had said. He had a word, now. A _word_. Science, he read once, lay merely in the art of finding stupid names for beautiful phenomenon. Perhaps he might switch the words around: The pain wasn’t beautiful.

But the name, in its simplicity, was.

Al’s hands twitched from the need to grab the book from Ed’s grip; his eyes burned from the desire to reread the book until the pages tore and the text imprinted itself across the matter of his mind. He never, ever wished to forget.

 

Ed grew his hair out. Al kept his short.

 

On the morning of their departure home Al and Ed threw themselves at Sensei’s feet, hugged her legs and her waist and her every bit to thank her over and over again for the miracle she had brought into their lives. Chuckling, she pried them off. “If you ever come visit and I’m not dead yet, I’ll beat both your asses. I’m your old _sensei_ and dammit I don’t need you crawling back to a crone like me.”

“Sensei?” said Al, suddenly humiliated. “What does that mean? I never asked.”

Sensei raised her eyebrows; her timbre softened. “It’s Ronshitese. For _teacher_ or _mentor_ or something like that. I never learned the language, but I picked up a few words here and there.” She lowered her voice to a tone of flat solemnity, and they listened as if the information would save their lives. “Hey. Listen, kids. If you’ve got any kind of heritage. _preserve it_.”

“Even if that heritage is _fuckin’ stupid_?”

Al and Sensei frowned in the same moment with the exact same slight backwards tilt of the head as if to ask _really?_ of the golden-haired boy with crossed arms. “It’s not, and you’ll regret it later. What’re you guys from? Go visit the country someday.”

“Yeah. Sure. Maybe one fuckin’ day I’ll just _stumble_ onto the damn secret to the universe while poking around my—wha’cha call it— _heritage_ or whatever.”

“If you say that word one more time, Edward Elric, I’ll alchemise your tongue off.” Ed gulped, and Al snickered. “Now move your asses. You’ve got a train to catch.”

 

The first night in the house again he awoke with a hoarse pain wailing through his lower torso, like someone had impaled a metal rod through his abdomen and out the other end. His hands flew to his stomach; no cuts, no wounds, nothing. His mind leaped. Appendicitis. A burst blood vessel somewhere in his system. A swollen organ, a kidney stone, a thousand different possibilities for a pain so harsh in his abdomen.

Blankets. Slick with wetness. Some sticky and vaguely heated, most crusted over and flaking. Al heard himself scream before he clapped his hand over his mouth.

By the time Ed, formerly asleep on the other side of the bed, had lit the lantern and was shaking Al’s shoulders with demands of _are you okay are you okay oh God Al tell me you’re okay_ , Al knelt in a pool of his own blood. Not a pool: a few streaks on the inside of his boxers and scarlet splotches on the sheets. But to him the expanse

“It’s okay,” Ed snapped in that take-charge voice of his that usually comforted Al but that at the moment forced him to ball his hands to shaking fists to avoid punching his brother in the face, “‘cause I’ve read about this, right, it happens to gir—to people with, uh, _girl parts_ —when they’re around this age. Yours came a li’l early, it’s oka—”

Al punched him. “Don’t say that again.”

“Don’t say what?” Ed prompted: His brother didn’t _do_ soft, but he _did_ do listening and helping in whatever way he could.

“Nomenclature.” Al started to draw a circle in the sheets with a length of chalk he carried in his pocket. Ed began to inscribe the symbols within, reading Al’s mind, the two synchronised as they almost always were. “It’s like alchemy. If you draw the wrong line, even _once_ , the entire array falls apart. _Knowledge_ is the first step of alchemy, before _deconstruction_ and _reconstruction_.”

The blood vaporised; Al wrinkled his nose from the metallic sting. “So what should I say?”

“They’re not _boy parts_ or _girl parts_. You know the scientific names for them. Use them.” Al transmuted the remainder of the blood away. Folded the blanket to wash later from the thin crust of trace elements. They cleaned up in silence; Al crouched by the toilet and vomited, once, less out of hurt and more out of a nausea he hadn’t expected. When he returned to curl around his pillow with a wadded kerchief shoved uncomfortably between his thighs, he reached across the blankets to poke Ed in the arm. “I want Mom back.”

Ed looked up at the sky. “Me too. You wanna do it tomorrow?” Al nodded. “Yeah?” Another nod. “Yeah. I can’t wait to see her smile again, you know?”

“Mmhm.”

He spent the night trembling under the sheets, increasingly aware of the flow trickle of fluid down his thighs, unable to sleep for fear of dreams swimming with his naked form.

 

The array required blood. To reconstruct a body meant having a genetic code from which to pull information of the body in the first place: Cells could not function without a chromosome, or without the twenty-three pairs of the most humans, and recreating a genetic code from scratch necessitated a greater skill than any alchemist of the past had ever possessed.

By combining their genetic codes, the brothers could at least artificially recreate _something_ like their mother’s original form in which to impart the soul.

Ed passed Al the knife, never once mentioning the blood congealed on the inside of his boxers, and Al had scarcely felt more grateful in his life.

 

No pain. None whatsoever. Neither did he sleep nights, nor did he eat food, nor did he possess a human body beyond vision and voice. The smell of soft rains after the zenith of spring and the feel of newborn blades of grass tickling the soles of his feet were lost to him,for as long as he remained full metal. But not his hope, for as long as he remained fullmetal.

Yet within this frame of metal and reverbations he could envision himself however he wanted. On the occasion that someone commented on his higher voice, he would remind himself of the young age at which his soul had become encased in the ancient armour. And the vast majority of the time no one questioned a two-metre broad-shouldered man apparently strutting around in a functional suit of armour. If anything, people asked: How could _he_ be the younger brother?

Al laughed and corrected the confused passersby gently while Ed raged, ranted, ripped the world in half in his not-really wrath. Well, of course Ed snapped; for him, shortness represented a personal failing. But Al wondered if Ed also raged for his younger brother’s benefit.

To some extent he knew that he had crossed the boundary before the worst of the—what the book had called _dysphoria_ —set in. The one day he spent truly _comprehending_ the mere preview of the road before him had been hell enough.

 

When he met Mei and the girl gushed over the princely Edward Elric, Al retorted with the first words of which he could think: _“I’m tall_.”

She fixated on him, splurging her affections in ropey strands that curled around the inside of his armour and vibrated the steel container with a sensation he couldn’t recall ever having felt, even when he had retained his body. In the few times that he met her over the course of his usual journey her constant beaming buoyed a smile to his soul. Constantly fantasising about her prince come at last. Well, as she explained, her consort, a golden boy to sit beside her while she ruled over Xing and make her smile with love.

He could work with that.

During their winter together, as she taught and frustrated him with her knowledge of alkahestry and as he startled and pleased her with his knowledge of anatomy, she uncovered a certain slim green volume, the cover marked with a fig leaf. _Gender and Equilibrium: A New Take on Gender Theory and Biology_. By Hideyoshi Le Châtelier.

She asked.

He told her; she had every right to know, or so he told himself, steeled himself for the inevitable knife. She laughed. Not at him, she assured him after he stepped back, as if she could read his emotions despite the utter lack of face. But at his worry. “You’re a boy.”

“Mm.”

“Then I don’t mind at all. I like boys, Al-sama; I don’t particularly mind what they have in their pants!” She grinned cheekily and Al hugged her tightly; her panda chirped in protest. “In fact, I’ve got a little secret, too.” She blushed. “I, I’m not sure of the word in Amestrisian, but I think it’s _ace_.” He made a noise of confusion—the same one that accompanied their many lessons in the wonders and irritations of the Dragon’s Pulse—and she explained, carefully, about how she’d grown up thinking that she simply was a child yet, but by the age of thirteen she had come to understand the delineated differences between her responses and her half-siblings’ of the same age. And perhaps she would change her mind still; the rest of her life stretched out before her in boundless opportunity. She finished, her timbre trailing off, and then she waited. He could see her braids trembling.

Al patted her hair. “An ace in the hole, then, Mei. Perfect for a deadshot like me.”

Mei giggled. Tapped her forehead. “Then. Back to the Pulse!”

He groaned. But good-naturedly. Back to the Pulse, to the thrum of alchemical energy, to the All is One and One is All to which he had always returned.

 

His father’s surprise at seeing him intrigued him. “My vintage armour!” he’d yelled, and then, afterwards he sputtered out something that wasn’t quite _my son_ but which, Al thought, might have carried the same sentiment.

 _Son_.

Al tried to remember when van Hohenheim fled the house. Whether Al himself had known at the time.

“It’s been, what, ten years.” His father ruminated on the length of time for a moment. Winry and Al exchanged a covert glance; Winry nearly raised her hand to swat van Hohenheim’s face in an attempt to test whether or not he’d spaced out. “Alphonse.”

 _He did know_.

“Yeah,” answered Al, less to confirm the decade and more to confirm the name. To the side stood Rosé with an expression of vague discomfort; without moving, Winry somehow managed to gravitate to stand next to her, two women against a world of father-son relationship shenanigans with tension so thick he could probably transmute it like solid matter.

“I heard what happened from Pinako. About your body, and . . .” His father’s gaze darted up and down the armour. Al remained silent. Winry and Rosé edged further away. “Uh.”

 _Uh_. Al shifted. “So, um, Father.” _Father_. A clear hint as to Al’s unvoiced inquiry.

Just then two construction workers in baggy uniforms appeared, seemingly summoned by the awkwardness, to flag down van Hohenheim. The first hefted a slender steel girdle over zir shoulder, while the second held a long iron pipe. “Are you busy?” ze called. “We could use your help.”

“Happy to oblige.” With the rapid reply, his father smiled brightly of relief. Sidestepping towards the construction workers, he waved a dismissive hand in Al’s direction. “We’ll talk later.”

“Oh.” Though Al possessed neither a throat to constrict painfully nor eyes to film with saline tears. For once his voice comes out hollow as the inhuman container of his soul. “Sure.”

But as his father left, Winry tapped Al’s wrist, gestured towards van Hohenheim’s back in the distance; his words bridged the gulf that nothing else had “. . . I abandoned him and his brother when they were just children. I’m sure he doesn’t even think of me as a father . . .” His voice faded, but the nomenclature drifted through the air, fragile as gossamer silk, and settled around his shoulders like a cape. Or a protective blanket. Cotton. White.

Him _. And_ his _brother. And_ he _doesn’t think._

His father’s troubles not from anything to do with Al but everything to do with his _own_ fuck-ups. And Al could respect him for that. Could forgive him for that. Could love him, for that.

Winry nudged Al in the side. “Told you it’d be okay.”

Had Al retained his cheeks, he would have blushed scarlet as Ed’s jacket. “Thanks, Win.”

“For telling the truth?”

Al glanced up at the skies. “Funny, how you can read the truth better than any alchemist.”

Winry’s hands soared to her hips; behind her, Rosé giggled. “That’s because you guys are so wrapped up in observing everything and naming everything and checking everything down in little boxes that you don’t really _get_ what it is you’re looking at.”

He _hmm_ ed. “I guess.”

“But if it makes you feel better to label yourself,” Rosé said gently, “then do so. She means that you don’t _have_ to place yourself in a box.” Her face flushed. “Ah, not that I know what’s going on.” A fond smile curving her lips, she touched her breast. “But I used to love someone like that. Sie didn’t care about gender at all.” Her smile lingered. “Are you okay, Al?”

Al nodded. “I’m fine, really.” He flailed his hands. “I’m fine, I’m fine! But thank you worrying about me.”

Winry and Rosé looked at one another.

Suddenly the man from the café leaned over the counter. “Hey, kid.”

 

“ _How can I fight with a body like that?_ ”

 

When he surfaced from the void, his bones stood out like taut granite pillars just beneath the surface of his skin, stripped away in favour of a skeleton, almost alien in its cold white manifestation of humanity. His ribs caved inwards like a church archway on the threshold of collapsing; his cheekbones threatened to slice through the tender hollows of his face. Dry and cracked, more reptilian leather than human skin.

Over his form, newly scrawled from the aether, he felt— _felt_ , a marvelous new word in his vocabulary that indicated not an emotion, pale and shallow as it reverbed in the curve of steel, but _sensation_ clear and sharp as a metal blade against his throat—something he couldn’t name at first. Like gravity.

He knew gravity. When he leaped and slammed against the shuddering ground the weight of gravity bore down upon his shoulders. Something of that consequence, but over the entirety of his body.

 _His_ body.

As with alchemy and the vitality of precisely measured angles, precisely straightened lines, precisely drawn geometric shapes and scaled elemental symbols, so too with language. Word choice. _His_ body. _His_. Not a suit of armour left by a father who had spent his happiness and then abandoned them in search of further joy down the road. Nor a suit of flesh left by a genetic probability that had spent its chance and then abandoned him in search of a biological role he could never fulfill.

But _his_ body. _His_.

 _Pain_.

The word came unbidden, sudden, to his tongue. The muscle stirred in his arid mouth, thickened as with sand or mud. “Pain,” he choked out hoarsely.

He could feel pain once more. He could curl his nails into his palm. He could wince from the tendrils of torture through tendons.

“Al.”

A voice from the void, followed by arms and warmth and _face_ that blossomed into existence one by one as his brother gathered him in an embrace. “Here.” Softness over his shoulders. A blanket. The pain ebbed slightly and Al named the vanishing agony, too: _cold_. The electric excitement of this newfound power of—of _naming_ his world—reminded him of the excitement that had surrounded his first transmutation. The tongue-twinging buzz. The hair-raising flow. “Al.” Ed wrapped his arms around Al’s shoulders; the simultaneous pain of gravity lifted, and he indulged instead in sensation. The strength in his brother’s tensed hand. The ferric scent of his brother’s blood. The honeyed gold of his brother’s eyes. Sun gold. Icarian gold. “Alphonse. Are you okay?”

“I’m f-fine, Brother.” His teeth chattered and it _hurt_ and he wanted to cry from joy that it hurt. “I love you.” That felt important. He repeated it: “I _love_ you, Brother.”

Ed blinked. “. . . I love you too. Al.” As if he couldn’t say the word enough times, couldn’t open his mouth in the _aaah_ , couldn’t touch the tip of his tongue to the roof of his mouth for the _lll_. “Alphonse, I promised you, didn’t I? We’re the Elric brothers. I was _gonna_ get us our bodies back.”

As the pain of his dessicated body subsided Al slowly became aware of the differences between the body he had left—those _years_ back, his mind returning to a time he had nearly lost—and the one he had gained. The obvious, yes: the withered muscles, the brittled bones, the loosened skin. And yet there lay more beneath the surface. Under the blanket he allowed his trembling fingers to trace over the tops of his wrinkled thighs, past the the stressed lines dipping to his hips, to the space that had burned shame into him far before his years.

The anatomy books that had haunted him for years would do nothing but remind him, now, of his physique.

He raised his head. Ed’s eyes, gold and bright, greeted him. “You—”

Ed grinned. Despite the blood smeared over his face, despite the automail port rusting in his shoulder, despite the agony that had accompanied his trials on the Promised Day, his glorious bastard of a brother _grinned_. “I _told_ you. I promised you right there, right _then_ , on that day. That I was gonna get your body back even if I had to kick Truth’s ass to do it.” Carefully peeling an arm away from the nestled support of Al’s back, Ed clapped his hand over Al’s. “We’re the Elric brothers, dammit. I just wanted to see you smile.”

Al lowered his gaze down to his form. To _his_ body. _His_. Though his tear ducts had dried from his time in the Gate, he butted his head against Ed’s shoulder, sheathed his vision in darkness, and wept.

 

The first time Mei saw him again she refused to let go for hours. “You’re beautiful,” she whispered in his ear over and over and over again.

He coughed. Laughed weakly. “My body is that attractive?”

“Yes, but that’s not what I meant.” Tightly clinging, she would not shift, not even to loosen her grip in the slightest. “Your _happiness_ is beautiful. You’ve earned your happy ending.”

“And my dashing princess.”

She _beamed_ and he could hear the angels sing. “And my dashing prince of princes.”

 

 _When I was reconstructing his body from the Gate_ , Ed wrote in a hole-in-the-wall café in East City en route to visit the Hugheses with a promised parcel of apple pie, _I realised that I had the perfect opportunity. Reconstruction, you see. I couldn’t create new matter or new energy, but I could alter and change the position of what was already there. I’m not exactly a doctor, but hell, if I could reconstruct my internal organs in a state of semi-consciousness, I could definitely help out the other most important person in my life. You know?_

 _And then you wonder,_ Winry wrote back with a flourish, _why it is I love you._

 

 _I think that that’s what Ed told you_ , wrote Mei in Xingese, with the translation in Amestrisian on the back to force Al to practise, _but I have a suspicion that the true reasoning might be slightly different. In coming back from the Gate, your_ soul _was able to inhabit a body. Ed reconstructed you to some extent: You don’t have the scars you used to, like you’ve said. But you also had the chance to naturally correct yourself._

 _Which one do you think is right?_ Al wrote in careful Xingese characters, his strokes thin, even, and painfully slow. _Do you think that it’s about having the wrong body for your soul?_

 _No. I’ve read of individuals like that who_ were _a different gender but who didn’t have as many bodily issues. They’re featured in medical texts; unfortunately most of the texts describe such issues as disorders, often psychological, but at least the recognition of its existence is there. You’ve read what I’ve written on like cases in_ my _compendium, whenever I finish that. No, I believe that, with you, because you wanted a different body so badly, your soul influenced the reconstruction. It would be interesting to examine how you are at the moment on a deeper level, considering the theories that gender has to do with genetics in some form or fashion, but honestly, I’m just glad that you’ve found happiness and comfort in the beautiful young man that you are._

 _And then you wonder_ , Al wrote back with a flourish, _why it is I love you._

 

Two years. Al filled out bit by bit. His frame thickening, his limbs thickening, his muscles thickening. His gait lengthened naturally as he marathoned the Resembool path until he could run it in his sleep. His hair became voluminous and glossy, and he styled it like Winry, who had in turn taken a page from Lieutenant Hawkeye’s book, according to her.

The first day he could hold a pencil without dropping it long enough to scrawl a thank-you letter to Winry for putting up with him for the past few months, he barely kept himself from crying tears of joy.

Ed complained that his dear younger brother was starting to weigh more than him; sweetly Winry inquired if _weight_ had replaced height as Ed’s new Thing To Complain About, in which case she could offer a neat solution by replacing every single foodstuff in the house with apple pie.

One summer morning Al made the call to Central, to the four chimaeras whom he had met on the road. Two of them—Heinkel and Darius—had evidently vanished from sight along with Yoki, but a rumour on the street confirmed a lion, a gorilla, and a man with a certain iconic moustache had been spotted at a travelling circus. The others, Jerso and Zampano, leaped on the chance. Within a handful of hours the brothers broke into van Hohenheim’s old study; Al pulled book after book from the shelves. Medicine. Anatomy. Pages he had poured over in the past come to life before his eyes.

“Mei agreed to teach me alkahestry,” he explained to his brother and his more or less adopted sister over chocolate, “so it won’t be that difficult at all, I don’t think. Studying the chimaeras will help, too: I had the chance to get my body back, and I want to give everyone else the same.”

Winry nodded. “There _are_ so many who’d love that. Even if nothing you could come up with would work perfectly.” He heard the hesitation in her voice. “Like Paninya. Or Lan Fan.”

Al watched her for a long moment, then sipped his hot chocolate thoughtfully. “I never knew.”

“It’s more common than you’d think,” Ed mused. “Bad and good. Bad, ‘cause there’re so many hurtin’ because of it, y’know? But good, too, ‘cause you’re not alone.” He touched Al’s knuckles with his. “You’re too good for this world, Al.”

“Be careful, Brother.” Al smirked faintly and drained the cup to the bottom. In the reflective droplets lingering he could see the imprint of his face, powerful and masculine and _his_. “I might just end up besting you in the title of greatest alchemist in history.”

Ed shrugged. “The best man’ll win. To the victor, his spoilers.”

“And to the loser?” Winry curled the tip of her hair around her forefinger.

Al could answer that one. They both could.

“A brother to come home to.”


End file.
